


The Remittance of Trifles

by apiphile



Category: Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: Gen, I am not allowed to ever make puns about trifle again, M/M, actual literal trifles, archiving old fic, i'm too tired to be amusing in tags, repressed povs are the most fun to write, romance via dessert, this fic DOES contain trifles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 15:06:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Holmes hasn't eaten in a while and is being stubborn about it. Watson makes a desperate attempt at forceful nutrition.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Remittance of Trifles

Chief among Holmes's dissatisfactions with Watson, the good doctor knew, was Watson's preoccupation with cleanliness and domestic order. Holmes had no interest in the maintenance of any household except where it pertained to a case, and it irked him that such a thing should matter to any other man (women, Watson gathered, were positively encouraged to keep a goodly house providing the house in question was not the one in which Holmes resided); it especially bothered Holmes that any uninteresting tripe such as the state of the skirting-boards or his own eschewing of sleep for several days should be pointed out to him, "As if I had not already observed this and _judged it irrelevant_."

To Holmes, perhaps, to singe the skirting-board and chemically stain the curtains with dreadful fumes was of no consequence, but as Watson saw it there was at least one direct _consequence_ ; the stirring of their landlady's temper and a polite but firm request for additional funds to cover the cost of replacing that which Holmes's curiosity had destroyed.

"Trifles," Holmes snapped, when Watson appraised him of his concerns regarding their landlady's patience. "Persistent trifles. This is all you come to me with, Watson, disrupting my very important work – "

"Drinking my seven percent solution like tonic water and dying the wallpaper purple is not important work –"

"You cannot _possibly_ comprehend the reach of my findings."

"Probably not, Holmes, as _I_ have not been slaking my thirst upon topical anaesthetic," Watson sighed. "Would you at least allow Mrs Hudson in here? I gather she is most anxious to see the stains removed from the desk varnish."

" _Again_ you trouble me with trifles," Holmes said, and his focus was such that it was as if he was scolding the crucible and flasks before him, "have you no patients to attend to? No silly notebooks in which to scribble your lurid adaptations?"

_Trifles, is it?_ Watson thought, taking his leave in an ill temper. _We'll see about that_.

* * *

The process of making a jelly was thankfully outside of Watson's knowledge; he was conscious that it involved in some way the rendering of calves' bones or pig trotters or the like, and he tried not to pay too much attention to the particulars in case it put him off enjoying his puddings. It was no simple task, or so he inferred from the expression that crossed Mrs Hudson's face when he made his request. He tolerated her sighs and exclamations that it was not Christmas and there was no call for it, and when at last the dish was complete he took it from her red-scrubbed hands at the foot of the stairs and explained that it was still not yet safe to enter Holmes's rooms.

Mrs Hudson gave a disapproving sniff. "It is _never_ safe to enter Mr Holmes's rooms, if one is of a constitution."

Watson looked at the pudding bowl and agreed that if one were at all prone to offense, fainting, or a certain degree of belief in social niceties, Holmes's rooms were not a place one should have to enter. He brushed Mrs Hudson away, opened the door with his elbow, and walked with due caution through the maze of stuffed animals, piles of books and periodicals, theodolites, sextants, a black-painted globe with the relative positions of live volcanoes picked out in gold, a bowl of walnut shells, and a pair of discarded slippers.

Holmes was evidently pursuing his question for greater scientific understanding without the benefit of socks, as Watson found one depressed beneath the sole of his indoor shoe on the next turn.

"Holmes?"

At least, Watson thought as he balanced the pudding bowl between his palms, ignoring a faint pull from his shoulder, there was no diaphanous veil of smoke overlaying the detritus. Perhaps the man had even deigned to open a window, or leave open one of the windows Watson had most recently propped into place with several copies of _Gulliver's Travels_ , a fire iron, and some putty.

It was more likely that the contents of the local butcher's had taken to the air and flown past the window, their resurrected trotters thrashing in such a manner that one of the panes had been shattered; but Watson believed in hope and the ability to change, because if he did not he would have long since gone mad. 

"Holmes?"

"Be quiet, and mindful of where you walk," Holmes said in a low, urgent voice from the shadows beyond his work desk.

Watson fell briefly prey to the desire to pitch the pudding bowl at the man's _fat head_ , but resolved his restraint into a more steely temper and straightened his already poker-straight back. The crunching of delicate glass fragments beneath his indoor shoes troubled him with each step; at first it sounded not unlike the death of an unfortunate snail, but a beam of adventurous light illuminated the crystalline carpet and banished this suspicion. Holmes was doubtless bloody-footed and oblivious, lost to pain inside the cocoon of cocaine, and it would take hours of careful labour to tease every fragment of fractured flask from his soles. 

"Where is my _Systema Plantarum_ , Watson?" Holmes asked, abrupt to the point of ill manners; Watson barely noticed.

"I would imagine under L for _Linnaeus_ on the book shelves in the Natural History division, by the third window," Watson said, holding the pudding bowl higher to his chest.

"You would _imagine_ a great many things, Watson. Why would it be under L when I expressed a wish for the books to be arranged by _title_?"

The content of the pudding bowl vibrated like a struck bell as Watson found his grip increasing and his breath disquieting itself. "Because I have not had time or inclination to pursue your blasted whims, Holmes. I am not your librarian." He held the bowl at arms' length in the direction whence Holmes's last imperious utterance had emerged.

"I don't like puddings," Holmes said after a moment's inspection. He implied with the word _puddings_ equitable disgust as if the word had instead been _effluent_ or _degenerates_. Watson, who enjoyed puddings very much and thought them the most pleasant part of a well-presented meal, found that he had narrowed his eyes as if focusing on a distant enemy.

"You will eat it _regardless_ of this," he said, in a voice which he did not venture upon even the most obstructive of his patients.

"I beg to differ," Holmes muttered, brushing aside some papers. "I am not in the least bit hungry."

Watson conceded in the confines of his own mind that Holmes was not hungry despite having consumed nothing more substantive for days than a slice of bread so stale that a sailor adrift in the Indian Ocean would have turned up his nose at it, and that Holmes was not hungry because he had consumed every dilution of coca powder in the premises and could no longer distinguish hunger from any other "unnecessary distraction".

"Nonetheless," Watson persisted, "you have not eaten for a long time and soon you will faint."

"Nonsense."

"My dear fellow, you cannot argue with the function of a man's body."

"I can and I _am_ ," Holmes retorted sharply, "was it not you yourself who spoke to me of men in India who had trained themselves into freedom from the shackles of earthly sustenance?"

"Was it not you yourself who determined the means by which they were slowly killing themselves?" Watson proffered the trifle again. "Eat, please. I will not suture another gash in your scalp."

"Fortunately," Holmes scowled, measuring a few grains of a light-blue substance Watson did not recognise, "I am able to suture my own wounds." He pinched closed a miniscule paper packet and, Watson thought perhaps he did so without noticing, made his hair even more of a mess. "Besides, trifle is the foodstuff of women and children. I am neither."

"You _behave_ like a child," Watson muttered, on firm ground indeed.

"That is the prerogative of seekers of the truth," Holmes said airily. "We require a childlike curiosity and persistence in the pursuit of knowledge."

Watson sighed. "Eat your trifle."

He waited for a time he judged to be several minutes, the pudding bowl weighing heavy in his hands, a delicious smell rising from the carefully-prepared pudding. Watson might even have described the scent as _Heavenly_ , had he been speaking to someone other than Holmes. There dwelt within some infusion of rose water, and Watson, who had eaten heartily for lunch as was his custom, felt himself begin to salivate. 

"Very well," Watson said, withdrawing a silver spoon from his breast pocket with some difficulty, "I shall eat this trifle."

Holmes's head whipped around as if he had been insulted or struck. His eyes gleamed. "That's _my_ trifle," he said in the tones of a man whose pride has suffered a mortal blow.

Watson shook his head and balanced his borrowed spoon above the very top of the trifle, a mere half inch from touching the surface of the thickly-spread cream. "I am afraid that when you do not consume the trifle, it ceases to be your trifle, old cock," he said sadly. "And now it is anyone's trifle."

The bowl was yanked without ceremony or care from Watson's hands, the spoon falling unregarded into the mass of the pudding, and Holmes hugged it to his chest like a schoolboy lost in the throes of gluttony. "Clear off, Watson, there's a good chap," Holmes said levelly, seeming to trace the outline of the spoon in the cream with his finger tip. Perhaps he simply swirled his hand in an arbitrary fashion; however, Watson had known Holmes for quite long enough to know that nothing the man did was arbitrary save _washing_ and _remembering to eat_.

"I am afraid I must remain here and see that you take your … medicine," Watson said, stifling a sudden smile. The corners of his moustache lifted, although he succeeded in keeping most of his mouth in a straight and stern line.

A gob of cream on the tip of his first finger, Holmes came to a halt before it reached his mouth and cast a suspicious look at Watson which might have burnt the skin from his face were it a beam of sunlight. "What have you _laced_ this preposterous pudding with, Watson?"

Watson sighed and stared at the ceiling. "Every terrible substance known to man," he said, resigned to an argument. "Sherry. Sugar. I believe Mrs Hudson —"

The expression of diabolical recognition which flickered upon his companion's face was a signifier of the mistake Watson had made in referring to their unfortunate landlady. It was too late to divert Holmes's attention from his petticoated nemesis, however, when the glittering look took root in his eyes. "— Ah ha," Holmes barked, triumphant, "so it is poisoned!"

To tell him this was preposterous was futile, Watson knew. Holmes in the grip of his seven percent solution was not at home to the kind of reason which Holmes _not_ under its influence was the master; he might swear when untainted by the substance that Mrs Hudson was persistently attempting to murder him, but _then_ he was making a black joke whose particular humour was known only to him, rather than a statement of his sincere belief in her murderous intentions. 

Watson tried to take the bowl from Holmes's hands, but his companion had grasped both sides with the dogged determination of a beggar with a penny. "Then _I_ will eat the _blasted_ trifle," he said, and his voice was more gruff than he had intended.

"It is _my_ trifle," Holmes snapped.

"You aren't _eating_ it," Watson grunted, as the bowl slipped from his grasp and remained clamped between Holmes's hands.

"I can hardly _eat it_ if you will not let me _have it_ ," Holmes grunted back, making no move to tug the bowl further away from him. He said nothing further, merely stared with the intentness that characterised his depraved reliance upon Watson's surgical medicines, and stared with fixed gaze at Watson's face until Watson felt his waistcoat shrink.

The line of Holmes's sight was drawn to a close on Holmes's mouth. Watson's waistcoat grew impossibly tight, and the room was intolerably stuffy. He shifted his weight and tried to look down into the trifle, to inhale the rose water and sugar mingling with the fine sherry, but his gaze was trapped by Holmes, and Holmes staring at his mouth. His gaze was trapped by Holmes and Holmes's neck, which rose from the unbuttoned chaos of his shirt collar like the stamen of an arum lily from the white wings of its flower. Even in his paralysis of reason Watson knew that to compare Holmes to a flower was an act of poetic license that far exceeded the bounds of sanity – the man exuded the smell of ripe meat, chemical smog, and the familiar scent of unwashed humanity. 

It was with great alarm that Watson became aware that his hand was on Holmes's chin, and only a moment later that his mind, usually at least as sharp as that of the average fellow, came to observe that Watson's hand upon the underside of his colleague's chin, tipping it toward the ceiling, was perhaps the more _trifling_ of offences; his mouth, he found, was pressed against Holmes's. His mouth was open, and his tongue protruded into Holmes's mouth. 

The clinical and rational voice that spoke from behind Watson's too-tight waistcoat, the stuffiness of the room, and the redness of his face, advised him calmly that he had done a very, very bad thing, and that now he should _run_. 

Watson whirled about as if he was an infantryman on a parade ground, and marched through the wasteland of Holmes's rooms to the hallway. He would visit, he decided, the bedridden Mrs. Hermann, the elderly German woman whose arthritic complaints could eat up hours of his time until he began to sympathise with those immoral families who smothered their grandmothers for money and freedom. He would visit Mrs. Hermann and Mr. Garrance and every truculent and wealthy and elderly patient he had, out of London and away from Baker Street.

He was very assiduous in forgetting, as he packed his travelling bag and tied into place the appropriate medicines and instruments, folding his clothing with military precision, that as he had kissed Holmes in a fashion that could not have been dismissed as exuberant friendship were he even the character of man who indulged his affections thus – that Holmes had returned this kiss with interest and vigour, an open mouth and the trifle bowl still clutched between chemical-stained his hands.


End file.
